19
ON 11 SEPTEMBER 1973, like millions of other political progressives across the world, García Márquez, sitting in front of a television in Colombia, watched in horror as Chilean air force bombers attacked the government palace in Santiago. Within a few hours it was confirmed that the democratically elected President Salvador Allende was dead, whether murdered or having committed suicide no one knew. A military junta took power and began to round up what would become more than thirty thousand alleged left-wing activists over the coming weeks, many of whom would never emerge from custody alive. Pablo Neruda lay dying of cancer in his house at Isla Negra on Chile’s Pacific coast. Allende’s death and the destruction of his political dreams as Chile fell into the hands of a fascist regime made up the content of Neruda’s last days on earth before he succumbed to the illness which had beset him for several years.1
Allende’s Popular Unity government had been watched by political commentators and activists around the world as an experiment to see whether a socialist society could be achieved through democratic means. Allende had nationalized copper, steel, coal, most private banks and other key sectors of the economy, yet, despite constant propaganda and subversion from the right, his government had increased its share of the vote to 44 per cent in the mid-term elections in March 1973. This only prompted the right into redoubling its efforts to undermine the regime. The CIA had been working against Allende even before his election: the United States, beleaguered in its Vietnamese quagmire and already obsessed with Cuba, was desperate that there should be no further anti-capitalist regimes in the Western hemisphere. The savage destruction of the Chilean experiment, before the eyes of the entire world, would have something of the effect on leftists that the defeat of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War had exerted almost forty years before.
At eight o’clock that evening García Márquez wrote a telegram to the members of the new Chilean junta: “Bogotá, September 11, 1973. Generals Augusto Pinochet, Gustavo Leigh, César Méndez Danyau and Admiral José Toribio Merino, Members of the Military Junta: You are the material authors of the death of President Allende and the Chilean people will never allow themselves to be governed by a gang of criminals in the pay of North American imperialism. Gabriel García Márquez.”2 At the time he wrote this message Allende’s fate was still unknown but García Márquez later said that he knew Allende well enough to be sure he would never leave the palace alive; and the military must have known it too. Although some said that sending this telegram was a gesture more appropriate to a university student than a great writer, it turned out to be the first political action carried out by a new García Márquez, one who was already looking for a new role but whose politics had now been brutally focused and radically hardened by the violent end to Allende’s historic experiment. He later told an interviewer, “The Chilean coup was a catastrophe for me.”
The Padilla Affair had turned out, predictably, to be the great dividing of the waters in Latin American Cold War history, and not just for intellectuals, artists and writers. García Márquez, despite the criticisms of his friends—ranging from “opportunism” to “naivety”—had remained the most politically consistent of the major Latin American authors. The Soviet Union was not the socialism he wanted but from the Latin American standpoint he considered it essential as a bulwark against U.S. hegemony and imperialism. This was not, in his eyes, “fellow travelling” but a rational appraisal of reality. Cuba, though also problematical, was more progressive than the USSR and had to be supported by all serious anti-imperialist Latin Americans, who should nonetheless do what they could to moderate any repressive, undemocratic or dictatorial aspects of the regime.3 He chose what seemed to him to be the path of peace and justice for the peoples of the world: international socialism, broadly defined.4
He had undoubtedly wanted the Chilean experiment to succeed but had never believed that it would be allowed to do so. In answer to a question from a New York journalist in 1971, he had said:
My ambition is for all Latin America to become socialist, but nowadays people are seduced by the idea of peaceful and constitutional socialism. This seems all very well for electoral purposes, but I believe it to be completely utopian. Chile is heading toward violent and dramatic events. If the Popular Front goes ahead—with intelligence and great tact, with reasonably firm and swift steps—a moment will come when they will encounter a wall of serious opposition. The United States is not interfering at present, but it won’t always stand by with folded arms. It won’t really accept that Chile is a socialist country. It won’t allow that, and don’t let’s be under any illusions on that point. It’s not that I see [violence] as a solution, but I think that a moment will come when that wall of opposition can only be surmounted by violence. Unfortunately, I believe that to be inevitable. I think what is happening in Chile is very good as reform, but not as revolution.5
Few observers had seen the future as clearly as this. García Márquez realized that he was now living at a critical juncture in world history. Over the next few years, despite his deep-rooted political pessimism, he would make a series of statements about political commitment which were perhaps best summed up in a 1978 interview: “The sense of solidarity, which is the same as what Catholics call the Communion of Saints, has a very straightforward meaning for me. It means that in every one of our acts each one of us is responsible for the whole of humanity. When a person discovers this it’s because his political consciousness has reached its highest level. Modesty apart, that is my case. For me there is no act in my life which is not a political act.”6
He looked for a way to take action. He was more convinced than ever that the Cuban road was the only feasible route to Latin America’s political and economic independence—that is, its dignity. But he was distanced, yet again, from Cuba. In the circumstances he decided that the route back lay, in the first instance, through Colombia. He had been involved in discussions for some time with young Colombian intellectuals, particularly Enrique Santos Calderón of the El Tiempo dynasty,7 whom he had recently got to know, Daniel Samper whom he had known for a decade, and later Antonio Caballero, the son of the liberal upper-class novelist Eduardo Caballero Calderón, with a view to creating a new form of journalism in Colombia—specifically by founding a left-wing magazine.8García Márquez had come to the conclusion that the only way for his deeply conservative country to reform itself was by what he would jokingly call the “seduction” and “perversion” of the younger generation from the old ruling families.9 Other key participants were the nation’s best-known chronicler of the Violencia, the internationally respected sociologist Orlando Fals Borda, and a left-wing entrepreneur called José Vicente Kataraín, who would later become García Márquez’s publisher in Colombia. The new magazine would be called Alternativa, its point of departure was “the increasing monopoly of information suffered by Colombian society at the hands of the same interests which control the national economy and national politics,” and its purpose was to show “the other Colombia that never appears in the pages of the big press nor on the screens of a television service more closely subordinated each day to official control.”10 The first number would appear in February 1974. The magazine would last six turbulent years and García Márquez, who would spend relatively little time in Colombia despite his best intentions, would nevertheless be a regular contributor and would make himself permanently avail-able for consultations and advice. He and the other leading participants invested large amounts of their own money in this inherently risky business. In the meantime he announced that he would be moving back to Latin America and, more sensationally, that he would be writing no more novels: from now on, and until the military junta led by General Pinochet in Chile fell from power, he was “on strike” as far as literature was concerned and would be devoting himself full time to politics.
In December, as if to underline his new resolutions, García Márquez accepted an invitation to become a member of the prestigious Second Russell Tribunal investigating and judging international war crimes. More significant perhaps than it might seem at first sight, this invitation was the first clear sign that he was going to achieve international acceptance in places and at levels unknown to most other Latin American writers and that despite his controversial commitment to Cuba he was going to have a relatively free hand to participate in political activity wherever and whenever he chose.
The first number of Alternativa in February 1974 sold 10,000 copies in twenty-four hours. The police in Bogotá confiscated several hundred copies but this would be the only case of direct censorship in the magazine’s history (though there would be “indirect censorship” through bomb attacks, court interventions, economic blockades and a sabotage of distribution, all of which would eventually bring about its demise). Later it would have persistent financial problems but the response in the early months was extraordinary. Before long it was selling 40,000 copies, an unheard-of figure for a left-wing publication in Colombia. The first number had a slogan about consciousness raising—“To Dare to Think Is to Begin to Fight”—and an editorial, “A Letter to the Reader,” which stated that the new magazine’s aim was to “fight the distortion of national reality in the bourgeois press” and to “counter disinformation” (a theme which had been famously exemplified by the aftermath of the banana massacre in One Hundred Years of Solitude).
The magazine, which appeared twice a month, included the first of two articles by García Márquez under the headline “Chile, the Coup and the Gringos.”11 It was his first incursion into openly political journalism since he had become famous and it achieved worldwide distribution (published in the USA and UK in March) and immediate classic status. García Márquez lamented what he construed as Salvador Allende’s misguided end:
He would have been sixty-four years old next July. His greatest virtue was following through, but fate could only grant him that rare and tragic greatness of dying in armed defence of the anachronistic booby of bourgeois law, defending a Supreme Court of Justice which had repudiated him but would legitimize his murderers, defending a miserable Congress which had declared him illegitimate but which was to bend complacently before the will of the usurpers, defending the freedom of opposition parties which had sold their souls to fascism, defending the whole moth-eaten paraphernalia of a shitty system which he had proposed abolishing, but without a shot being fired. The drama took place in Chile, to the greater woe of the Chileans, but it will pass into history as something that has happened to us all, children of this age, and it will remain in our lives for ever.12
It was the same tone of contempt with which García Márquez had been speaking about the Colombian parliamentary system since the mid-1950s, best exemplified in “Big Mama’s Funeral.” As for Salvador Allende, he had become a García Márquez character, one more martyr in the ghastly pantheon of Latin America’s failed heroes; many others were to follow and many optimistic but fearful politicians would become friends of García Márquez in the coming years in a perhaps desperate or superstitious effort to avoid such a destiny.
Just as García Márquez almost fled from Mexico once One Hundred Years of Solitude had been published and he had managed to pay off his debts, he now prepared to leave Barcelona after the completion of The Autumn of the Patriarch and the preparation of hisCollected Stories.13 He had always had a half-hearted, somewhat distracted and occasionally patronizing attitude to Spain and now his mind was on other matters and other places. The next year would involve a gradual adjustment of both his place of residence and his attention from Europe to Latin America and from literature to politics. Meanwhile Mario Vargas Llosa, who had arrived in Barcelona after him, was leaving before him. On 12 June 1974 Carmen Balcells hosted a farewell party for Vargas Llosa, who was going back to Peru.14 Most of the Latin American writers in residence during that period were there, including José Donoso and Jorge Edwards, as well as the Catalans José María Castellet, Carlos Barral, Juan Marsé, Juan and Luis Goytisolo, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, and many others. This, surely, with Vargas Llosa leaving and García Márquez preparing his own departure, was the ceremony which marked the end of the Boom in all its European splendour.15 Vargas Llosa set sail for Lima with his wife and family, leaving their many friends in Barcelona bereft, though Carmen Balcells would continued to provide a point of focus.
At the end of the summer García Márquez and Mercedes themselves took an extraordinary decision. They left the boys in Barcelona, in the tender care of their friends the Feduchis, Carmen Balcells, and the woman who cooked and cleaned the house, to travel, somewhat surprisingly, to London. García Márquez had decided it was time at last to attend to what he considered the only great failure of his life—his inability to learn English. He and Mercedes had suggested to Rodrigo and Gonzalo that they might consider two years in London. The boys flatly refused but were astonished, and resentful, when their parents announced that they at least would be going and left the two teenagers behind.16 The couple stayed for a time in the Kensington Hilton, a hotel they knew well, and enrolled in an intensive course in the Callan School of English on Oxford Street, which guaranteed excellent results in a quarter of the normal time with its “infallible” methods.
Learning English—which did not go well—was not García Márquez’s only preoccupation. It was in London, curiously, that the first steps were taken to reintegrate him into the Cuban Revolution. Since the 1971 Padilla Affair he had been even more ostracized than before but in London he contacted Lisandro Otero, a writer whose confrontation with Heberto Padilla had led indirectly to the first phase of the affair in 1968. Otero knew Régis Debray and Debray agreed to act as an intermediary between García Márquez and Cuban Foreign Minister Carlos Rafael Rodríguez. He told Rodríguez that the revolution was making a big mistake in leaving a figure of García Márquez’s significance in “political limbo.” Rodríguez agreed and the Cuban ambassador to London invited García Márquez to lunch and informed him: “Carlos Rafael wants me to tell you that it’s time for you to go back to Cuba.”17
Early in his stay in London García Márquez had been discovered in his hotel by several Latin American journalists from the pro-U.S. weekly Visión. He sidestepped most of their questions but gave an interesting insight into his impression of London:
London is the most interesting city in the world: the vast and melancholy metropolis of the last colonial empire in liquidation. Twenty years ago, when I came here for the first time, it was still possible to find, amidst the fog, those Englishmen with bowler hats and striped trousers who looked so much like Bogotanos of the time. Now they’ve taken refuge in their mansions in the suburbs, alone in their sad gardens, with their last dogs, their last dahlias, defeated by the irresistible pressure of the human tide coming in from the lost empire. Oxford Street looks like a street in Panama, Curaçao, or Vera Cruz, with intrepid Hindus sitting at the doors of their shops full of silks and ivory, with splendid black women dressed in bright colours selling avocadoes and conjurors who make the ball disappear from beneath the cup before the eyes of the public. Instead of fog there’s a hot sun which smells of guavas and sleeping crocodiles. You go in for a beer in a bar, like a cantina in La Guaira, and a bomb goes off under your seat. You hear Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, and Greek being spoken all around you. Of all the people I’ve met in London, the only one who spoke impeccable English in an Oxford accent was the Swedish finance minister. So don’t be surprised at finding me here: at Piccadilly Circus I feel as if I’m in the Portal of the Sweets in Cartagena.18
Few observers had foreseen London’s future identity as “world city” quite so early and with such clarity. Asked if any regime in Latin America would ever have unarmed police like the British ones, García Márquez retorted that there already was one: Cuba. And the big news in Latin America, he went on, was the consolidation of the Cuban Revolution—hostile observers at the time believed such “consolidation” was in fact “Stalinization”—without which none of the current progressive developments in the continent would have been possible—nor, he added, the literary Boom itself. Finally, he reiterated that he would not be writing any more fiction until the Chilean resistance had overthrown the Chilean dictatorship, whose members were paid by the Pentagon. There was a clear sense in this hostile interview that García Márquez was burning boats and raising the flag of his socialist commitment. Why? Because he was sure that he was on his way back to Cuba.
When he was not attending his English lessons in London, he tinkered with the definitive version of The Autumn of the Patriarch and played with different ideas for radical film scripts. He and Mercedes were visited by his youngest brother Eligio and his wife Myriam, who had moved to Paris in September, and Eligio and his famous brother Gabito became closer despite the twenty-year gap between them. Eligio and Myriam would spend Christmas 1974 in Barcelona with Gabito, Mercedes and their two sons.
In September 1974 political problems had arisen within the Alternativa editorial board and Orlando Fals Borda’s faction left the magazine. Enrique Santos Calderón later told me, “We intended to be pluralist but people divided very quickly into different groups. Gabo suffered acutely with all the troubles, he finds internal tensions between his friends very difficult to deal with. Each furtive return he made caused him anguish but they also politicized him, woke him up to the reality of armed struggle and made him an idol of the left.”19 In December García Márquez interviewed CIA renegade Philip Agee, whose revelations about the organization’s activities in Latin America would shortly be causing a sensation worldwide.20 By now no one was refusing a meeting with García Márquez. In the 1974 elections in Colombia, after the formal ending of the National Front pact, Liberal Alfonso López Michelsen had come to power with 63.8 per cent of votes cast, though over 50 per cent of the electorate failed to vote. Despite his doubts about López Michelsen’s politics, García Márquez was happy to have him as president, given their distant kinship through the Cotes family link in Padilla, his own prior relationship when he took López Michelsen’s law course at the university in Bogotá and the possibilities of working with a man who was certainly not a reactionary.21
The Autumn of the Patriarch was published at last, in March 1975, in Barcelona. The Latin American press had been full of rumours that the novel’s publication was imminent right up to the day that it—the most eagerly awaited book in Latin American history—hit the bookshops. It was launched by his Spanish publisher, Plaza y Janés, with a print run of a staggering 500,000 copies in hardback. In June Plaza y Janés would publish his Collected Stories and García Márquez would have settled his accounts, for the time being, with his literary readers. Despite, or perhaps more accurately because of, the high expectations, the reviews were disconcertingly mixed and many of them were downright hostile.22 Some critics liked the book for its extraordinary poetry and ironic rhetoric which both exalt and parody Latin America’s darkest fantasies at one and the same time; others disliked it for a whole battery of reasons ranging from its alleged vulgarities to its incessant hyperboles, from its lack of punctuation to its apparently problematical political stance. These divergences were particularly marked at the time the book was published but the radical disagreement has continued down the years.
Nevertheless it was The Autumn of the Patriarch that finally con-firmed García Márquez as a professional author, the book that showed he could write another big novel after One Hundred Years of Solitude. Even those who disliked it did not attempt to deny that it had been written, manifestly, by a great writer. Although One Hundred Years of Solitude evidently proclaims a vast and unmistakable continental dimension, it is still a recognizably Colombian book. The Autumn of the Patriarch, on the contrary, is a Latin American book, written with that symbolic readership in mind, with almost no significant Colombian dimension, not least because Colombia never had the sort of patriarch it portrays: formally, it was a “democratic” nation through most of the twentieth century.
In a sense it is The Autumn of the Patriarch and not One Hundred Years of Solitude which stands as the decisive oeuvre of García Márquez’s career as a writer, because, contrary to first impressions, it encapsulates all his other works. Whether or not it is considered his “best” novel, as García Márquez himself has frequently asserted, it is not difficult to see why he thinks it his most “important” one, especially if we add to its compendiousness two further considerations already mentioned: the insistence that the portrait of the Patriarch is a portrait of himself and the fact that he wrote the book to “prove himself” as an author after the stupefying success of One Hundred Years of Solitude. It might be said, then, that while One Hundred Years of Solitude is undoubtedly the axis of his life (and the most important book as far as the wider world, and perhaps posterity, are concerned), The Autumn of the Patriarch is the pivot of his work: after this, ironically enough, the all-consuming nature of his literary obsession with power would be at an end—at the very moment that power became the central theme of his life. When he had declared that he would not write another novel until Pinochet fell, it was for two very good reasons: firstly, and above all, he was determined to make contact with Latin America’s own living patriarch, Fidel Castro; but secondly, for the time being, he had nothing really important left to write—because, it can now be seen, the first half of his career as a writer did not end with the ecstasy of One Hundred Years of Solitudebut with the agony of The Autumn of the Patriarch. As far as literature was concerned, he was not at all sure where to go next. So he concentrated on Castro.
That spring he was in London again with Lisandro Otero, who recalled: “García Márquez and I were dining with Matta in the House of Brahimi, the Algerian ambassador, when a servant came to the table with an urgent message for Gabo. He went to the phone. It was Carmen Balcells, who had just arrived from Barcelona with the first copies of The Autumn of the Patriarch. As soon as we finished dinner we went to her hotel. She gave Gabo the five copies that had come off the press that very afternoon. He immediately took a pen and dedicated them to Fidel and Raúl Castro, Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, Raúl Roa and me. I felt that with that gesture he was trying to declare his commitment, in the most unequivocal fashion, to the Cuban Revolution.”23
Assuming his overtures to Castro were successful, his new strategy would require a complex and subtle self-presentation. He would support both socialism and liberal democracy at one and the same time, through his very own but secret “popular front.” At the beginning of June 1975 he flew into Lisbon on Russell Tribunal business—the business of human rights and democracy. But the Portuguese Revolution had broken out in April 1974—a revolution in Europe: perhaps everything was possible!—and it had been carried through in the first instance by soldiers. Its implications for Africa—and Cuba—would be far-reaching, as they would be for García Márquez himself. He met Prime Minister Vasco Gonçalves and the poet José Gomes Ferreira, among others, and would soon publish three major articles in Alternativa on the course of events in Portugal after the revolution.24 His support for the Portuguese Revolution, for the Peruvian military revolution then in full swing, and the heavily militarized Cuban regime, showed a surprising openness to martial involvements. He said in Lisbon that the Peruvians expropriating newspapers was no different from the expropriation of oil, which he also supported; he personally did not believe in bourgeois freedom of the press, which was “in the last analysis, freedom only for the bourgeoisie.”25 This infuriated Mario Vargas Llosa, by then back in Peru.
García Márquez headed for the Caribbean by way of Mexico City. On his arrival in the Mexican capital he prayed to the Lord that he would never be awarded the Nobel Prize and although, as it later turned out, the Lord was not listening, Excelsior conveniently was and the possibility of García Márquez attaining such future glory was planted in many thousands of minds.26 As for wealth, on 17 June Excelsior reported that between them One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Autumn of the Patriarch had made García Márquez a very rich man.27 Evidently he could afford his self-imposed literary vacation and he could afford to take risks with his popularity in pursuit of his political vocation.
Back in the Caribbean he went in search of answers to the questions that now obsessed him. Cuba’s government was run by revolutionary guerrillas who had turned themselves, and indeed the whole of the Cuban people, into soldiers. Allende had been overthrown by a reactionary military. Now, in Portugal, Europe’s longest-lived dictatorship had also been overturned by the army. Were revolutionary soldiers—arise General Simón Bolívar!—the answer to Latin America’s problems? He travelled to Central America to find out. There he interviewed a tempestuous, swashbuckling figure second only to Fidel Castro in his attractiveness to García Márquez, General Omar Torrijos, the populist dictator of Panama since 1968, another of those characters who argued that dictatorship for and of but not by the people was sometimes necessary given the neo-colonial condition of contemporary Latin America.28 García Márquez and Torrijos would become bosom buddies, almost blood brothers. (It was Torrijos who, after sitting down and reading The Autumn of the Patriarch, would look up at García Márquez and say, “It’s true, it’s us, that’s what we’re like.”) Torrijos, a quite different personality to Castro (whose “popular” performances were strictly—some would say cynically—choreographed), had begun a historic campaign to recover the Panama Canal for Panama and he explained to García Márquez his negotiations with the USA for a new Canal Treaty and the conditions he would and would not accept. As García Márquez himself pointed out, it was to say the least inconvenient for the USA to have a military rebel appear in the country where the U.S.-run School of the Americas, “in which the soldiers of the continent learn to combat the insurgency of their peoples,” was located. Torrijos told his new friend that he was prepared to go to “the ultimate consequences” to get the canal back and to eradicate colonialism from his country.
García Márquez was particularly interested in Panama. Not only was it once a part of Colombia, before U.S. imperialism encouraged its secession; it was also the country where his own grandfather, Nicolás Márquez, had travelled as a young man and had pursued one of his most important love affairs. Torrijos was a man who could easily have been born in Barranquilla—indeed, in many respects he was reminiscent, even in looks and manner, of García Márquez’s dead friend Alvaro Cepeda. Quite quickly the two men would come to build a friendship based on a deep emotional attraction which evidently turned over time into a kind of love affair. And García Márquez was not alone: even the ice-cool English writer Graham Greene developed a close and affectionate relationship with the Panamanian leader and eventually wrote a surprisingly unguarded book about the process of “getting to know the general.”
BUT COMPARED TO Fidel Castro, already by then one of the great political personalities of the twentieth century, even Torrijos was a minor figure. It is easy to imagine how fascinating the thought of getting to know Castro must have been for a man as obsessed from an early age with the theme of power as García Márquez. In The Autumn of the Patriarch some parallels are unmistakable. The novel, which appeared three months before García Márquez’s first visit to Cuba in fourteen years, described a dictator obsessed with rural activities, especially cattle breeding, yet who had “smooth maiden hands with the ring of power.” Both details point to Fidel. Some references may be coincidental, others are unmistakable: “he built the largest baseball stadium in the Caribbean and imparted to our team the motto of victory and death.”
Similarly the Patriarch arbitrarily changes dates and times and even suppresses Sundays, just as Fidel Castro himself would eventually abolish Christmas and then, years later, resurrect it. And just like Fidel, García Márquez’s dictator, during his early years of messianic power, turns up unexpectedly all over the country and personally inspects public works or sets them in motion, and this gives him an enduring popularity so that the people would not blame him for their misfortunes: “every time they learned of a new act of barbarism they would sigh inside, if only the general knew.” Eventually, after the Americans take the sea away—which could be interpreted as the almost fifty-year “blockade,” heroically resisted by the Cuban people—the Patriarch reflects, “I had to bear the weight of this punishment alone … no one knows better … that it’s better to be left without the sea than to allow a landing of marines.” The brutal irony is that the portrait has increasingly fitted Castro more than twenty-five years after the novel was written; he too, with the embargo, had the “sea” taken away from him, and he too presided over a regime which decayed before the eyes of the world while he himself appeared imperturbable. Though only the most fanatical of his enemies have considered him a “monster.”
In 1975, however, Castro was beginning one of his most successful periods. The regime was coming through the “Stalinist” moment that had included the Padilla Affair and was soon to launch its historic and audacious military campaign in Africa. In 1975 fourteen Latin American countries would restore diplomatic relations with the island regime, including, on 6 March, García Márquez’s forty-eighth birthday, Colombia, which had broken with Cuba under Alberto Lleras in 1961. The decision—taken by López Michelsen—must have seemed an extraordinary augury to García Márquez, who had already made his own secret decision to re-establish relations with the Cuban Revolution, and had arrived in Bogotá only four days before.
In July the moment finally came and he travelled to Cuba with Rodrigo. Back at last. The revolutionary authorities gave them all the facilities necessary to travel the length and breadth of the island, going where they pleased and talking to whoever they wished. Rodrigo would take over two thousand photographs. García Márquez recalled, “My idea was to write about how the Cubans broke the blockade inside their own homes. Not the work of the Government or the State but how the people themselves solved the problem of cooking, washing and sewing their clothes, in short, all those daily problems.”29 In September he published three memorable dispatches, under the general heading “From One End of Cuba to the Other,” which brilliantly combined large compliments with small criticisms in such a way as to demonstrate to the authorities that here was a big-league revolutionary player with an unprecedentedly safe pair of hands.30
Over the summer the entire family regrouped in Mexico. García Márquez and Mercedes had found a house down in the south of the city, in Calle Fuego (“Fire Street”), in the Pedregal del Angel zone, just beyond the National University. This modest house is still their main residence more than thirty years later. There were some family bridges to be rebuilt, which is perhaps why García Márquez had taken Rodrigo with him to Cuba, when he must have been a distraction. Of the return to Mexico Rodrigo would tell me, “The fact is that Mexico is the country we’ve always gone back to, not Colombia. It’s as if my parents became Mexicans in that period between 1961 and 1965.”31
The return to Mexico would allow the boys to confirm and rebuild their long-term identity. Neither of them felt either Colombian or Spanish but their relationship with Mexico had also been severely interrupted. Rodrigo would be determined to establish his own independence and get on without the García Márquez name; eventually he would leave the country. Gonzalo, as the younger son, would be less hypersensitive on this score but he too would try to find his own way without too much reliance on his father’s celebrity, though this would be especially difficult in Mexico. Once again the boys were sent to English schools in order to complete their secondary education.
In Bogotá, meanwhile, a bomb exploded in the offices of Alternativa in November 1975, attributed to some form of vigilante unit—“at exactly the time,” Enrique Santos Calderón would tell me, “when we were denouncing problems of corruption at the very top of the army”32 Undaunted, though admittedly safe in Mexico, García Márquez released a statement in which he said that the bomb was obviously the work of the Colombian army and must have come from the very top. Clearly, he said, López Michelsen’s refusal to close the magazine had spurred the military into vigilante action. Evidently his recent enthusiasm for soldiers did not extend to the Colombian variety. Even more provocatively, he specifically named the Minister of Defence, General Camacho Leyva, as personally implicated in these repressive policies. The Colombian military would not forget this. Nor would they forget their suspicion that the organizers of Alternativa sympathised with, perhaps even colluded with, the guerrillas of M-19, the middle-class rebels of choice and the group who had symbolically stolen Simón Bolívar’s sword in 1974.
Still, the wider world was changing fast, apparently for the better. General Franco, whose regime had executed five Basque militants on 27 September, despite worldwide protests (Olof Palme of Sweden said the Spanish government were “bloody murderers”), had a major heart attack on 21 October and Prince Juan Carlos took over as Head of State. On 20 November Franco finally died, to the general delight of left-wingers all around the planet. Juan Carlos was declared King on the 22nd and three days later announced a general amnesty. Spain was about to embark on a transition to democracy which would change it dramatically. On 10 November Angola had become independent of Portugal, amidst violent conflict: the Marxist forces of the governing MPLA, already assisted by Russian advisers, were ranged against the U.S.-backed UNITA of Jonas Savimbi. On 11 November Cuba announced the decision to send thousands of troops to Angola, where they would remain for thirteen years. This would be García Márquez’s chance to show what a great journalist could do for the revolution.
BUT NOT EVERYONE was impressed by García Márquez’s attention-grabbing behaviour. On 12 February 1976, now a resident of Mexico City, he turned up at the premiere of a film version of Survivors of the Andes. As he arrived, Mario Vargas Llosa, in town for the event—he had written the screenplay—was standing in the foyer. Gabo opened his arms and exclaimed, “Brother!” Without a word Mario, an accomplished amateur boxer, floored him with one mighty blow to the face. With García Márquez semi-conscious on the ground, having struck his head as he fell, Mario then shouted, depending on the source: “That’s for what you said to Patricia.” Or: “That’s for what you did to Patricia.” This was to become the most famous punch in the history of Latin America, still the subject of avid speculation to this day. There were many eyewitnesses and there are many versions not only of what actually happened but why.33
It is said that the Vargas Llosa marriage went through a difficult moment in the mid-1970s and that García Márquez took it upon him-self to console Mario’s apparently distraught and resentful spouse. Some say that he did this by advising her to initiate divorce proceedings; others that the comfort he offered was more straightforward. Evidently Mario concluded that García Márquez had put his concern for Patricia before their friendship. Only García Márquez and Patricia Llosa know what did or did not happen.34 And only Patricia Llosa knows what she told her husband when they were reunited. In other words, only she knows the entire story.35 As for Mercedes, she would never forgive Vargas Llosa. And she would never forget what she considered a cowardly and dishonourable act, whatever the provocation might have been.
The ingredients of politics, sex and personal rivalry make up a potent cocktail, in whatever proportions they are shaken together. Behind Vargas Llosa’s evident sense of betrayal may have lurked an anxiety that the small unprepossessing Colombian was proving too much for him. Mario’s own extraordinary and well-deserved literary success and matinée-idol good looks were not in themselves enough; so perhaps his only remaining weapon was the big punch. And he probably only managed that with the benefit of surprise: one imagines a forewarned García Márquez running around him, like Charlie Chaplin, and kicking him repeatedly up the rear. No matter how well Mario himself wrote, no matter how much publicity he received, it was García Márquez whom the newspapers and the public most wanted to hear about; and however justified Mario felt in his rejection of Castro and Cuba, García Márquez seemed to have emerged scot-free from the fallout after the Padilla Affair and had become the unchallenged literary champion of the Latin American left. It must have been intensely frustrating.36 The two men would never meet again.
In March and April García Márquez was back in Cuba. He had already had worldwide acclaim with his articles on the Chilean coup and he must have felt that his was a talent that Fidel Castro would be foolish to ignore. So he set out to make the Cuban leader an offer he could not refuse. He proposed to Carlos Rafael Rodríguez that he should write the epic story of the Cuban expedition to Africa, the first time a Third World country had ever interposed itself in a conflict involving the two superpowers from the First and Second worlds. Given Cuba’s history of slavery and colonialism, the African liberation movements of the era were of particular interest to Cuba and no less a figure than Nelson Mandela would later judge that Cuba had made a significant and perhaps decisive contribution to the overthrow of apartheid in South Africa.
Cuba’s Foreign Secretary passed García Márquez’s idea on to Fidel Castro and the Colombian spent a month waiting in Havana’s Hotel Nacional for the Comandante’s call.37 One afternoon at three o’clock Castro turned up in a jeep and took over the driving so that García Márquez, who was with Gonzalo, could sit next to him. They set off into the country and Fidel talked for two hours about food. “I asked him,” García Márquez would recall, “‘So how come you know so much about food?’ ‘Chico, when you have the responsibility to feed an entire people, you’ll find out about food!’” Like so many others before and since, García Márquez was stunned by Castro’s astonishing love of facts and phenomenal mastery of detail. He might have anticipated this from listening to the great leader’s unscripted eight-hour speeches but he was not prepared for Castro’s personal charm and courtesy, which could light up not only a tête-à-tête like this one but a room of twenty or thirty people.
At the end of the expedition Fidel said, “Invite Mercedes across and then talk to Raúl.” Mercedes arrived the next day but then they waited another entire month for Raúl Castro’s call. Raúl was the head of the armed forces and it was he who personally briefed García Márquez: “In a room where all the advisors were, with the maps, he began to uncover the military and state secrets, in a way that surprised even me. The specialists brought in coded cables, deciphered them and explained everything to me, the secret maps, the operations, the instructions, everything, minute by minute. We were at it from ten in the morning to ten at night. They gave me a list of key people with instructions to talk freely to me. I took all that material off to Mexico and wrote a complete description of ‘Operation Carlota,’ as it was called.”38
When García Márquez had completed the article he sent it to Fidel “so he’d be the first to read it.” Three months later nothing had happened and García Márquez returned to Cuba for discussions. After consultation with Carlos Rafael Rodríguez he revised what he had written and “clarified important questions and added details that were missing.” The article was syndicated all over the world and the Castro brothers were delighted. García Márquez had won his revolutionary spurs; or, as Mario Vargas Llosa would later put it, had become Fidel Castro’s “lackey.”
Not only had he pleased Fidel but later García Márquez received the International Press Organization’s world journalism prize for his chronicles on Cuba and Angola. It may be assumed they were unaware that he had had three distinguished collaborators. For a while to come García Márquez, understandably intoxicated by his personal friend-ship with the most important figure in recent Latin American history, would tell journalists that he was unwilling to talk about Fidel because he was afraid of seeming to be a sycophant—and then he would rave on anyway. These statements enraged Cuban exiles in Miami and elsewhere.
García Márquez continued his research and self-education as an informed defender of the Cuban Revolution. He had probably already abandoned his book on daily life under the blockade, though he continued to use it as cover for a time. He had realized from the beginning that the question of human rights and political prisoners would be a crucial issue that his enemies would fling at him. But once the Americans under Nixon and Kissinger had taken the gloves off in their treatment of Latin American progressive movements and were training military regimes in “security methods,” including assassination, torture and disinformation, and now that he had thrown in his lot with Castro’s Cuba, he needed to document himself on the prisons issue—even if documenting himself meant doing whatever he had to do to persuade himself that the situation was acceptable and supportable in all the circumstances. (He was learning a lot about prison regimes in his work for the Russell Tribunal.) At the same time, ironically, the USA itself now had a new leader and the puritan President Jimmy Carter was preaching human rights and seemed sincere about the matter. So Nixon had taught García Márquez that U.S. governments would never really change but Carter taught him that public relations, diplomacy and propaganda were also now a vital part of the ideological struggle on the international stage. García Márquez was convinced that the external opposition actually wanted Cuba to have political prisoners so that they could continue their attacks and he thus believed, perhaps naively, that the country should reduce the number of such prisoners to as close to zero as possible. This would be a large part of his endeavour in the coming years. And it would shift his focus from militancy withAlternativa and a defence of Cuba’s African intervention to international diplomacy and, over time, as things got more difficult, a rearguard defence of Cuba’s sovereign integrity tout court.
Late in 1976 he arranged to talk to long-term counter-revolutionary prisoners at the prison of Batanabó. From that list, at random, he chose the case of Reinol González. González was an opposition leader who had worked through the Christian trades union movement, a committed Catholic, and, effectively, a Christian Democrat.39 He had been arrested in 1961, accused of plotting to kill Fidel Castro with a bazooka near Rancho Boyeros Airport and of setting fire to the El Encanto shopping centre in Havana and killing an administrator called Fe del Valle. González himself would later admit that these charges were true. After García Márquez’s conversation with González at Batanabó, his wife Teresita Alvarez contacted the writer in Mexico City and asked for his help in securing her husband’s release. García Márquez was moved by her entreaties and saw the possibility of a win-win manoeuvre. He resolved to talk to Castro but saw him four or five times without daring to broach the matter.
Eventually Castro took him and Mercedes out for a ride in his jeep. On the way back, García Márquez recalled, “We were in a bit of a hurry and I had six points noted down on a card that I wanted to bring up with him. Fidel laughed at my precision with each point and said, ‘This yes, this no, we’ll do that, we’ll do the other.’ When he’d answered the sixth point we were going through the tunnel to Havana and he asked me, ‘And what’s number seven?’ There was no number seven on the card and I don’t know if the devil whispered in my ear but, put like that, I thought, ‘This could be the right moment.’ I said, ‘Point number seven is here but it’s really awkward!’ ‘OK, but tell me what it is.’ Like someone throwing himself overboard in a parachute, I said, ‘You know, it would give great satisfaction to a family if I could take Reinol González, liberated, to Mexico to spend Christmas with his wife and kids.’ I hadn’t looked behind me but Fidel, without looking at me, looked at Mercedes and said, ‘And why is Mercedes looking like that?’ And I, without looking back, without seeing what expression Mercedes had on her face, answered: ‘Because she’s probably thinking that if I take Reinol González and he ends up playing some dirty trick on the Revolution, you’re going to think I messed up.’ Then Fidel answered not to me but to Mercedes: ‘Look, Mercedes, Gabriel and I will do what we think is right and if after that the other guy turns out to be a louse, that’s another problem!’” Back in their hotel room the always judicious Mercedes rebuked her husband for his impertinence but García Márquez was exultant. Months went by, however, and Castro said that he had not yet been able to persuade his colleagues on the Council of State. Complex issues were involved and García Márquez and González would have to be patient.40
Meanwhile, August 1977 saw García Márquez’s first significant connection with a European socialist who would be a crucial contact, and friend, over the coming years: Felipe González, the leader of the Spanish Socialist Party, PSOE. González had been elected Deputy for Madrid in Spain’s first elections for forty-one years on 15 June, an election in which Adolfo Suárez became Prime Minister for the ruling right-of-centre UDC party. The legendary Communist militant La Pasionaria had returned to Spain for those elections, for the first time since the Civil War. At the end of August, González, a lawyer, was in Bogotá and gave an interview to Antonio Caballero (editor), Enrique Santos Calderón (director), and García Márquez (“editorial adviser”) of the Alternativastaff. The article was entitled “Felipe González: a Serious Socialist.”41 PSOE’s policy in Latin America was to support all popularly based regimes in more or less democratic countries and to support liberation movements in non-democratic countries: “We are united by the objective of liquidating regimes which slow the democratic rhythm.” The article did not include González’s views on Cuba, a question which would eventually cause trouble between him and García Márquez years later.42
It is possible that this interview started a lot of bells ringing in García Márquez’s head. Before long he would be closely engaged, despite his own scepticism about their beliefs and activities, with numbers of members of the moderate and democratic Socialist International, from his good friend Carlos Andrés Pérez, the President of Venezuela, whose parents had Colombian connections, through France’s François Mitterrand, to Felipe González himself. Both Mitterrand and González had closely followed Allende’s progress and demise—but surely Europe was different? In December García Márquez would have an intense conversation in Paris with Régis Debray, another onetime revolutionary contemplating the democratic road (which he would eventually take, inside François Mitterrand’s government). By this time Debray himself was already a member of the French Socialist Party and García Márquez quizzed him as to whether he was still a “real socialist” and what he thought of the progress of revolution in Latin America.43It is more than likely that from this moment García Márquez was on his way out of Alternativa and looking for another role. And it would be a dual role: one approach in Latin America and another in Europe. Once again García Márquez was searching for room to manoeuvre.
In early June he had published another article about his friend Omar Torrijos, unashamedly referencing one of his own works in the title: “General Torrijos Does Have Someone to Write to Him.”44 This could stand of course for a question about García Márquez then and in the future. Was he writing about men of power, to men of power, or for them? As in Cuba, he began by addressing the Panamanian human rights question, presenting himself as an honest broker between reality and the reader (just as eventually he would attempt to mediate between Castro and Torrijos, on the one hand, and González and Mitterrand on the other). Thus he made a show of finding out the situation of alleged political prisoners in Panama—Torrijos has been accused over time of being involved in torture—and offered to mediate between the Torrijos regime and Panamanian exiles in Mexico. Then in August another major article by García Márquez appeared about the Panamanian caudillo, his negotiations with the USA, and the threats upon his life.45 García Márquez characterized Torrijos as “a cross between a mule and a tiger,” a formidable adversary and a brilliant negotiator, intensely human and popular with the ordinary people.46
The new Panama Canal Treaty was signed at last on 7 September 1977 in Panama City. The Panamanian delegation included two additional members, Graham Greene and Gabriel García Márquez, both travelling on Panamanian passports—as many of the world’s criminals were accustomed to doing—and thoroughly enjoying the experience, like two overgrown schoolboys.47 They particularly enjoyed their close physical proximity to the dastardly Pinochet. In October Panamanians approved the new treaty by plebiscite, though the USA continued to make amendments and then finally ratified the revised version on 18 April 1978.
In 1977 the García Barcha family finally began to make its adjustment to the inevitabilities of separation as the boys grew up and began to go their own way in life. Of course in a sense Gabo and Mercedes had left their sons in 1974–5 before the two boys could leave them, but at that time there was still a family home—though a temporary one—in Barcelona to which everyone would naturally return. Now the boys were on their way to leaving home. In particular Rodrigo was on his way to cookery school in Paris and Gonzalo was thinking of following him there to study music.
García Márquez had been waiting all this time for news of his initiative over Reinol González. At last, in December 1977, matters began to move.48 At a reception in Havana for Jamaica’s Prime Minister Michael Manley, Fidel Castro approached García Márquez and said, “Well, you can take Reinol.” Three days later García Márquez and a stunned Reinol González arrived in Madrid, to be joined almost immediately by his wife Teresita. In early January 1978, García Márquez, Mercedes and Rodrigo would meet up with González and his family in Barcelona, where they would hear in detail about his harrowing experiences in Cuban prisons. After that, on 15 January, the González family would fly to Miami. Later, González would vindicate García Márquez’s strategy and Castro’s agreement to it by playing a key role in negotiations when the revolution started the dialogue with the exile community abroad after Castro decided that it was time to reduce tensions with the families of the three thousand imprisoned counter-revolutionaries.
For years García Márquez would play down his part in helping to persuade the Cuban leadership to make this crucial gesture of releasing the great majority of these prisoners. He had shown the Castro brothers that he was not only full of good intentions but also a sincere supporter of the revolution, less liberal and more socialist than he appeared and, above all, as they had intuited, a safe pair of hands. Gradually the relationship with Fidel moved beyond the purely instrumental and political, both men flattered by the other’s attention, to something like a friendship. (García Márquez would always insist to the press that he and Castro mainly talked about literature.) Castro, a confirmed workaholic, had a circumscribed and utterly secret private life and a limited social life. For many years it was believed that his only long-term relationship with a woman was that with his revolutionary comrade Celia Sánchez, who would die in 1980, and that following her death he had occasional dalliances with other women which sometimes produced illegitimate children. Only recently has it become clear that by the end of the 1960s he had begun a long-term relationship, effectively a marriage, with Dalia Soto del Valle, with whom he had five sons, a relationship that continues to this day. But Dalia was never given any official role and the image of Castro’s apparent solitude has been constantly underlined by the fact that she has not been a part of that limited social life.
Equally Castro has not been known, since the death of Che Guevara, to have many significant male friends, beyond his eternally loyal brother Raúl and men like Antonio Núñez Jiménez, Manuel Piñeiro and Armando Hart. So that the friendship with García Márquez was highly unusual and totally unexpected. How surprising, on reflection, is perhaps another matter. García Márquez was the most famous writer the Spanish-speaking world had produced since Cervantes and, by an extraordinary piece of luck, was a socialist and a supporter of Cuba. Moreover he was almost the same age as Fidel, both men were from the Caribbean, and both had become anti-imperialists partly as a reaction to the proximity of the U.S. monopoly producer of bananas, the United Fruit Company. Anecdotally, both men had been in Bogotá in April 1948 during the Bogotazo and some conspiracy theorists even believe that they began to subvert Latin America together from that time. Although a great writer, García Márquez was in no sense an aesthete or an intellectual snob and his lifestyle allowed him to keep Castro in contact with the wider world despite his virtual confinement within the borders of his tiny island in the sun. Castro himself told me that their shared Caribbean heritage and a shared Latin Americanist vocation were crucial foundations on which to build a friendship. “Besides,” he added, “we are both country people and we are both seasiders … We both believe in social justice, in the dignity of man. What characterizes Gabriel is his love of others, his solidarity with others, which is a characteristic of every revolutionary. You cannot be a revolutionary without admiring and believing in other people.”49
Generally things were going well for Cuba now, with a new revolutionary enthusiasm injected by the African adventure. But a quite new era was dawning. On 6 August Pope Paul VI died; John Paul I was appointed and died a month later, leading to the appointment of Karol Wojtyla, John Paul II, who, allied tacitly with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, both elected within eighteen months of his appointment, would turn the terms of political trade against Cuba for the next twenty-five years (not to mention hastening the demise of the Soviet Union). Worse, from the Cuban standpoint, only two days after the death of Pope Paul VI in August 1978 the Shah of Iran imposed martial law in his country, an act which would accelerate his overthrow and in turn bring about the fall of President Jimmy Carter and the election of right-winger Ronald Reagan.
The left performed as badly as ever in the Colombian elections in 1978 and the Liberal candidate Julio César Turbay Ayala was elected President and began his term on 7 August. Alternativa had been aggressive towards Turbay, a right-wing Liberal, from the beginning, with both cartoons and texts emphasizing how fat he was, with his trademark bow tie and nothing behind his glasses.50 Hoping to under-mine his candidacy and provoke the Liberals into finding a more moderate contender, the magazine had constantly questioned his motivation and his electability. García Márquez and Alternativa, both separately and together, would attack his presidency with unusual violence during the next four years, only to find that Turbay, or at least the forces that he represented, were more than capable of hitting back in even more violent and indeed unexpected ways.
Meanwhile, Central America continued its convulsive revolutionary process with Jimmy Carter apparently unable, like Pontius Pilate, to decide whether to referee the contest or join one of the teams. In Nicaragua the Sandinista (FSLN) rebels had been intensifying pressure on the Somoza dictatorship throughout the year. Sandinista leaders quite often met in García Márquez’s house in Mexico City and he sometimes saw Tomás Borge, a co-founder of the Sandinista movement, in Cuba. García Márquez helped to negotiate the agreement to unify the three opposing groups into a common Sandinista Front and would later even claim that it was he who dubbed the young revolutionaries los muchachos (“the kids”).51 On 22 August 1978 a group of Sandinista commandos led by Edén Pastora took the National Palace in Managua, kidnapped twenty-five House representatives, held them for two days and then flew four of them to Panama with sixty political prisoners freed in exchange for releasing the other hostages. Pastora, “Commander Zero,” had conceived this plan eight years before.52 García Márquez called Torrijos immediately and said he would like to publicize this extraordinary revolutionary success. Torrijos offered to keep the guerrillas incommunicado until García Márquez arrived. He set off at once and spent three days in a barracks talking to the exhausted leaders of the spectacular assault—Edén Pastora, Dora María Téllez and Hugo Torres—for a report which he would publish in early September.53 By the end of that month the USA was urging Somoza to resign. García Márquez said later that this report was exactly what he had in mind when he gave up literature for political journalism: “Edén Pastora and Hugo Torres fell asleep worn out by fatigue. I went on working with Dora María, an extraordinary woman, until eight in the morning. Then I went to write up the report in my hotel. When they woke up they corrected it, specifying particularly the right terms for weapons, group structures, etc. That next night I couldn’t sleep, I was so excited, like when I did my first job as a reporter, at the age of twenty.”54 Later in the year García Márquez would tell Alternativa that he had been involved in numerous high-level discussions about the Nicaraguan crisis.
In September, in the midst of his father’s feverish political activism, Rodrigo, disillusioned with cookery school, left for Harvard, where he would major in history. It seems a surprising destination for a member of this revolutionary family and perhaps it was this apparent contradiction which prompted García Márquez to assure El Tiempo in October that “my family is more important to me than my books.”
Once Turbay arrived on the scene in Colombia things began to change for the worse. A month after his inauguration in August he had proved his reactionary credentials by bringing in a security statute which would be roundly criticized by Amnesty International. During these months García Márquez had been involved in organizing, with a number of friends on the left, a human rights movement called “Habeas.” Jimmy Carter’s human rights policy, while undoubtedly sincere, was also an effective means of deflecting attention away from the many organizations which were protesting and contesting the wave of right-wing dictatorships in Latin America—in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Guatemala and Nicaragua. Carter of course argued that the governments of Cuba and Panama were also dictatorships and that the Sandinistas wished to build the same kind of regime. García Márquez fronted the new organization, which was headquartered in the relatively secure environment of Mexico City and inaugurated at a big metropolitan hotel on 20 December 1978.55 (Whether promises were made to the Mexican authorities that Mexico itself would not be fingered is not clear.) At that meeting García Márquez was able to declare that Cuba no longer had political prisoners. He was careful not to claim any credit for this.
Habeas was formed as a human rights institute for Latin America specifically to defend political prisoners, the cause which had first brought Enrique Santos Calderón and García Márquez together in the autumn of 1974.56 García Márquez was instrumental in the constitution of the new organization and undertook to finance it to the tune of $100,000 out of his royalties for the next two years. His friend Danilo Bartulín, formerly Salvador Allende’s personal doctor, who had been with him in his last hours in the Moneda Palace, was to be the executive secretary and there would be representatives in every Latin American country, including Ernesto Cardenal, Nicaragua’s revolutionary priest, and many others of similar stature and similarly progressive credentials. Most of them had a history of anti-Americanism and none of them were likely to want to turn the problems of habeas corpus in the direction of Cuba—and given the horror of what was going on in Chile, Argentina and Uruguay, neither was anyone else. García Márquez sarcastically declared that Alternativa intended to “help President James Carter carry out his human rights policy.” He suggested that the American leader should begin in Puerto Rico, where revolutionary patriots such as Lolita Lebrón had been in prison for twenty-five years for crimes far less serious than those which the Cuban government was currently pardoning.57
In January 1979 García Márquez had an audience with the new Pope, John Paul II, asking him for support for Habeas. He saw the pontiff in the Vatican library for fifteen minutes.58 He did not say so at the time but it was obvious that García Márquez found his brief encounter frustrating: he would later remark that the Pope was incapable of thinking about the rest of the world—even the “disappeared” of Latin America—without relating it to his “obsession” with Eastern Europe. Then on Monday 29 February he had an audience with the King and Queen of Spain, accompanied by Jesús Aguirre, Duke of Alba, the national Director of Music. They met in the Zarzuela Palace and their discussion about human rights in Latin America lasted over an hour. García Márquez was becoming a figure whom not only important leftist figures like Régis Debray and Philip Agee would have to see but also members of the international establishment. Asked how he’d got on with monarchs as compared with the politicians he was used to, García Márquez replied, “Well, the truth is they are very natural people to whom you can talk about anything. As for protocol, the King made things easy for me … They are well informed about Latin America and we had a number of memories of people and landscapes in common. They talked about our continent with real affection throughout.” El País took it as an extremely positive sign that the young constitutional monarch should be talking to such an important international figure, one whose last novel had been a critique of absolutist power.59
On 19 July 1979 the Sandinistas took power in Nicaragua. This news had been anxiously awaited all year, particularly since the USA broke off relations with the Somoza regime on 8 February. Somoza had declared a state of siege on 6 June and had finally faced reality and fled the country on 19 July. This was the first piece of really good news for the Latin American left in a long time, in a year in which things seemed at last to be looking up: Maurice Bishop’s pro-Cuban New Jewel movement had ousted the Prime Minister of Grenada on 13 March and on 27 October the island would become independent from Britain; the Panama Canal Treaty was due to become effective on 1 October; and Central America would continue on the revolutionary road with a military coup, deposing President Carlos Romero of El Salvador on 15 October. Four weeks before the Sandinistas took power García Márquez had carried out a telephone interview from Mexico City to Costa Rica with friend and fellow writer Sergio Ramírez, who had just been proclaimed one of five leaders of the new Provisional Government of Nicaragua in exile.60 The two men had discussed the make-up and functions of the new government, the military situation, Colombia’s policy of not breaking off relations with Somoza and the possible U.S. reaction. When García Márquez asked what a writer was doing mixed up in politics, Ramírez had replied, “Look, during a patriotic war, a war of liberation, against an occupation force like Somoza’s, everyone leaves their jobs, including the poet, and picks up a rifle; I consider myself on the battlefield.”61
García Márquez would always take an interest in the Nicaraguan revolution and would give it considerable support but he never showed the enthusiasm for it that he had shown for Cuba. For one thing he never had the same familiarity with Nicaragua as he had with Castro, nor at that time did he have the intimate relationship with any one member of the leading group which he enjoyed with Fidel. For another thing he always had a certain inevitable scepticism, as he had also shown towards the Chilean experiment: unless a country took the same ruthless military and political measures adopted by the Cubans, there was little chance that the USA would tolerate any kind of left-leaning regime. Moreover his doubts were underlined by Cuba’s own response. The Cubans helped Nicaragua but within a continental perspective on continuing revolution; and they too now had to be far more sensitive to the USA, which had been forced to accept a Soviet veto over invading Cuba itself but would never accept anything remotely like a “second Cuba.”
After a summer in which the family travelled the world, taking in Japan, Vietnam, Hong Kong, India and Moscow, Rodrigo went back to Harvard and Gabo, Mercedes and Gonzalo moved on to Paris, where Gonzalo would begin his musical studies, concentrating on the flute, and his father would spend a month on Unesco business. He had been invited to serve on the MacBride Commission inquiring into the First World’s monopoly of information through the international press agencies. He was interviewed by his friend Ramón Chao and Ignacio Ramonet for an article which, prompted by his work with the commission, was provocatively entitled “The Information War Has Begun.”62 The two journalists said that García Márquez was in Paris “almost on an incognito basis, almost clandestinely.”
García Márquez explained that the commission had been set up by Unesco Director-General Amahdou-Mahtar M’Bow following discussions in 1976. From the start it involved major compromises, since the Russians of course wanted a completely statist press and the Americans a completely private one. The official languages were English, French and Russian and the report would be sent to the General Conference of Unesco in Belgrade in late October 1980.63 García Márquez would later say that he had never been so bored nor, as a “solitary hunter of words,” felt so useless, but equally he had never learned so much—above all, that information flows from the strong to the weak and is a crucial means of domination of the poor by the rich.64 The work of MacBride would be opposed by both the USA and the UK and would eventually lead to both countries withdrawing from Unesco in the mid-1980s.
Curiously enough, it was precisely now—coinciding with the Soviet Union’s disastrous invasion of Afghanistan—that García Márquez began to alter his public pronouncements and his public persona. An early example was his statement at a meeting in Mexico City on 25 January 1980 that Latin America was a helpless victim, a mere bystander in the face of the conflict between the USA and the USSR.65 Perhaps for all his big talk with Chao and Ramonet, García Márquez was not as confident about either the future of the planet in general or of Latin America in particular as he had said—and certainly not that the future of the world would be socialist. Reflecting on Ronald Reagan’s election, he would muse in public that since Reagan was not as tough as he pretended, he would prove his gunslinger reputation in Latin America, “that immense, solitary backyard for which nobody apart from us is prepared to sacrifice their happiness.”66 This proved a very accurate prophecy.
But in any case he was hankering for a return to literature. There were insistent hints now from interviewers that García Márquez was wearying of his reckless promise about Pinochet made almost six years before. Excelsior on 12 November reported that he was writing a series of stories about Latin Americans in Paris and that he would publish them twenty-four hours after the fall of Pinochet. This was something of a disappointment to those who had construed him as saying that he would cease not just publishing but all literary activity as such until the Chilean dictator’s demise. Here he was apparently writing works which, as soon as his “literary strike” was over, would be queuing up for publication like jetliners circling above one of the world’s big cities waiting to land.
He was still not admitting an even larger truth: that he was embarked on a new novel. Earlier in the year he had continued to declare that he had “run out of themes,” that he “didn’t have another novel” in him.67 In fact his next novel, apparently apolitical, would signal a significant shift. Neither his readers nor García Márquez himself would realize that he was in fact looking for love. A vast return to the personal was under way everywhere in the world and García Márquez himself, contrary to first impressions, would be a part of that process.
Alternativa had been a remarkable endeavour but it had encountered increasing financial difficulties, especially once government pressure began to deter advertisers after Turbay came to power. By the end of 1979 these problems had grown critical. The organizers of the magazine continued to subsidize it out of their own resources but when it finally closed, on 27 March 1980, Santos Calderón and Samper sloped back to El Tiempo and those who were not connected to the Bogotá establishment began to look for other means of support; while García Márquez was free to reconsider his political and literary options and plan the next stage of his career.